Bringing Procurement Reform to Every City in America

Last month, the White House announced that our project, RFP-EZ, helped cut the costs of government IT projects by an average of 30%. Today, I’m excited to announce that we’re making that same technology to every city and state in America, regardless of the size of their budget or their IT department. We’re doing this by launching Screendoor.io, a software-as-a-service application modeled after RFP-EZ. This means:

You pay for a monthly subscription, with no initial upfront cost

You can try it out, without ever spending a dime

It never goes out of date, and new features are always being developed

There’s no server upkeep or other hidden costs

You can cancel your subscription and take your data at any time

By now you’ve probably heard about the fantastic results we saw during our pilot of RFP-EZ inside the federal government. Recently we’ve been talking to cities and encouraging them to try a similar pilot, but we realize that not every city has an RFP-EZ-sized budget available to them for procurement experimentation. By embracing a software-as-a-service platform, we’ve done something incredible: every single city, county, and state government is now able to run this pilot completely free of charge. We expect participating governments to see decreased cost, increased number of competitive bids received, and heightened engagement with small and local businesses. And if we don’t see this success? They won’t have spent a dime.

If a city has an engaged technology community and would rather own the application themselves, Procure.io will live on as a separate open-source project, available for cities and organizations that want to customize every aspect of the software.

Screendoor will be extremely affordable for cities that decide to continue using it – our plans start at just $29/month and scale with the size of your city and the number of procurements you’re running through the system. You can sign up starting today, and if you use the coupon code “SCREENDOORLAUNCH”, and your free trial will be upgraded from one project to ten.

And another note…

We’re happy to announce that we’re one of the 9 organizations that were selected to receive funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of the Open Gov Knight News Challege. It’s going to promote and extend our Procure.io platform, to support and scale Screendoor, and to build out an open library of RFPs and Statements of Work for anyone to use at any level of government.

We’re extremely excited to be able to empower new innovation in procurement, and we hope that we’ve given governments everything they need in order to make the leap. Stay tuned, and hopefully you’ll be hearing from us soon about how Screendoor has helped save taxpayer dollars, increase government transparency, and empower local businesses and communities.